Page:American Anthropologist NS vol. 22.djvu/340

 328 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [N. s., 22, 1920

country. At this time they found the Jemez tribe very difficult to control. Again arid again these people conspired with other Pueblos and particularly with the Navajos, to harass the Spaniards and the friendly Pueblos of Sia, Santa Ana and San Felipe; and time after time they were punished, their villages destroyed and themselves driven to the high mesas. Finally in 1696 occurred the last impor- tant insurrection. A battle was fought in which the Jemez were completely routed, their Pueblo allies from Acoma and Zuni deserted them, and they fled north to the Navajo country. In the following summer no trace of them could be found in the Jemez valley. They remained away for some time, apparently about ten years, but eventually returned to their deserted towns.

I can find no other account of any Pueblo people having moved so far to the north during or after the revolt; Gobernador canon is in the old Navajo country and, being nearly a hundred miles from the nearest Spanish settlement of that time, and in a wild and inaccessible district, would have offered an ideal refuge.

The presence of the hogan-like structures in connection with the ruins should also, I think, be taken into account. No such dwellings were ever made, as far as I can discover, by any past or present Pueblos. They seem surely to point to contact with the Navajo, which contact seems most appropriate to the case of the fleeing Jemez.

As to the desertion of the ruins, we must remember that the Navajo were always at bottom the natural enemies of the Pueblos. That the Jemez eventually returned to their none too fertile old range, in close proximity to the hated Spanish, is evidence enough that they were not in the most enviable of positions in the country of their notoriously fickle allies.

A comparison of the pottery found at the Gobernador sites with that from the villages from which the Jemez were driven at the time of the revolt, should definitely settle the question.

If it can be shown that these northern ruins were occupied by the Jemez, we shall have gained, not only an interesting bit of historical information, but we shall also be supplied with most valuable data for the study of the development of Pueblo pottery, for in the case of most historic ruins we know the date of abandon- ment, but it is usually impossible to say when they were built. Finds in them, therefore, cannot be later than a given date, but, on

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